The US and Israel planned to install a Holocaust denier as Iran’s president
You heard that right: before the Iran war began, the United States and Israel planned to make former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – a Holocaust denier who has called for the destruction of Israel – the new leader, according to a New York Times report. Evidently, Ahmadinejad, who was under house arrest because of ideological clashes with the supreme leader and vigorous populist critiques of corruption within the regime, was seen as a possible pragmatist, akin to Delcy Rodriguez in Venezuela. The plan quickly went awry, though, as an Israeli strike meant to free Ahmadinejad on the first day of the war ended up injuring him, causing him to become “disillusioned with the audacious scheme,” according to the Times. If the reporting is true, it would appear that the US and Israel’s initial plans for “regime change” – US President Donald Trump urged Iranians to “take over your government” – weren’t as ambitious as they appeared in public.
Meanwhile, the status of the US-Israel-Iran ceasefire remains uncertain. On Wednesday, Iran threatened counterstrikes “beyond the region” should the US resume bombing. Vice President JD Vance, though, said Tuesday that there had been “good progress” in talks.
Putin-Xi summit wraps with… not much
Russian President Vladimir Putin was in Beijing this week for talks with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, but the high-profile encounter – Putin’s 25th trip to China as president – yielded little. The two sides failed to reach agreement on a key agenda item: a massive but long-delayed Russia-China gas pipeline. It appears Beijing, by far the dominant economic partner in the relationship, is still holding out for better pricing. Putin’s visit came just four days after a highly touted Trump-Xi summit that produced similarly little in terms of concrete outcomes. In combination, though, the two summits did achieve something: they showed that Beijing is now a key stop for any great power diplomacy. But with no discernible movement on two key global issues – the war in Ukraine, where China has supported Russia, and the US-Israel war on Iran, where China is a partner of Tehran – to what end does Xi plan to use that clout?
Baltic states on edge
Early Wednesday morning, residents and government personnel in Vilnius, Lithuania, were alerted to take shelter after a suspicious drone was spotted near the Belarusian border – the first such shelter alert within the EU and NATO since the invasion of Ukraine. This came just a day after Moscow issued a warning to neighboring Latvia, citing unfounded claims that Ukraine intended to launch drones from Latvian territory, and just a day after a stray Ukrainian drone was shot down in Estonian airspace. Despite the Baltic states’ calls for additional support from the alliance, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is traveling to NATO’s foreign ministers meeting this week and is expected to call for members to boost their own defenses.
